#misinterpretation

Today I had to explain the clause disjunction in class. The textbook calls a structure ‘clear’, but my annotation marks the complementizer as unergative whereas the footnote calls it ergative. I did the assignment, opened the grading sheet, and got only 60% for what I thought was a straight up mismatch. Felt like a hit to morale. Tried sending the explanation to the TA, got back ‘not enough depth’—in hindsight maybe I'm overreading the notation. It’s still in the syllabus, so is it me or the book? How do you flag a textbook error to the editor without sounding like a nervous linguist??

i was reading this one poem and i totally misinterpreted the whole thing. thought it was about love but its actually about loss. feels kinda stupid now. anyone else ever do that?